


In the Eye of

by Heart_Seoul_Soshi



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Evie needs glasses, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 21:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14756633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heart_Seoul_Soshi/pseuds/Heart_Seoul_Soshi
Summary: There were so many wonderful and amazing things to see in Auradon; Evie just had trouble seeing them.





	In the Eye of

**Author's Note:**

> from an anonymous request on tumblr

Auradon Prep had a lot on Dragon Hall. It was clean. And bright. Set on top of a beautiful sprawling lawn instead of a literal cemetery. Evie loved it. Jay and Carlos liked it. Mal flinched in the sunlight. But when the four of them stepped out of the limousine and saw the flowers, the sun, the bright bright green grass, they knew right away that this was all going to be very different.

They would start class tomorrow, giving them the afternoon to settle in. So, Auradon was to be their new home, Mal and Evie talked about it as they unpacked. Mal had her reservations about being one of Prince Ben’s guinea pigs, his pet project of bridging the gap between Isle and Auradon. Evie was thrilled, for guinea pig or not, she was in  _Auradon,_ kingdom of magic and dreams and wishes. Like the good little student she never even intended to be, she had her books and binder neatly stacked on the desk by the time she went to sleep, ready and waiting for the day ahead of her tomorrow.  
  
What could she say? She liked learning. Even back on The Isle, where it was things like Advanced Vanities and Wickedness 101, Evie was always there at the front of the class, both pencil and mind alike sharpened. Her mother never approved, and insisted that brains did not win a prince, so Evie eventually learned to dumb herself down, to suppress every smart and skill so she could appease mother and one day catch the eye of a regal royal.   
  
And in Auradon, the regal royals may have roamed freely, but her mother did not. There was no more need to dumb herself down here, no shame in striding right into her first class of the day and taking a seat right there at the front.  
  
But here was another way Auradon Prep differed from Dragon Hall. Stakes and territories were not claimed on desks, Evie couldn’t just waltz in and declare a throne for herself, a prime position at the head of the class. The teacher glowered down at her over the top of his glasses, pompously waving a clipboard in Evie’s face before directing her and Mal to their assigned seats at the very back of the class. Evie was put off by the rudeness, and Mal was already checking her pockets for the fixings to make spitballs. But with Evie’s grudging insistence and steadfast ignoring of the teacher’s stink-eye, she and Mal took their things and moved to the back of the room. Some bridged gap between Isle and Auradon.  
  
Despite the brewing black cloud above Evie’s head filled with vindictive thoughts, some mildly foul language, and a few lighthearted calls for revenge, Evie chose to simply take her displacement in stride and focus on class, notebook open and pencil held firmly in her hand. When the overhead turned on to accompany their teacher’s droning voice, the sound of lead scratching against paper filled the air with its own little drone, with even Mal making herself scribble down notes instead of scribbling little doodles in the page corners. The slideshow moved fast as Teach went subject to subject, and every pencil moved to keep up.  
  
Every pencil except for Evie’s.   
  
She sat there as if frozen, blinking her eyes again and again until they actually started to water a bit. What was that on the board? A mass of shapes that were somehow foreignly familiar, like she swore she could place her finger on what they were yet the answer still escaped her. It reminded her somewhat of food on The Isle—buried in fuzz.  
  
“…Mal,” she leaned over and whispered. “What does that say?”  
  
“Blah blah blah, Imperial City, blah blah blah, invasion of Huns, blah blah blah, dishonored cows,” Mal boredly answered.  
  
Evie didn’t get that at all from the mish-mash of shapes. Instinct had her squint, beautiful eyes harshly narrowed, but it was hardly helpful.  
  
“M, can you see the board?” she asked.  
  
“Unfortunately,” Mal grumbled.  
  
Evie frowned, not understanding. She squinted some more, leaned forward in her seat, tilted her head, blinked crazily again, trying to clear her sight, but to no avail. She rubbed her eyes and looked a second time. Nothing.  
  
“…I can’t read that,” frustrated, she dropped her pencil to the desk with a clatter.  
  
“That’s the spirit. Don’t play by their rules.”  
  
“Mal! I’m serious!”  
  
Mal often snapped, but she wasn’t accustomed to being snapped  _at._ Especially not so by Evie.  
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
Evie gestured tensely to the front of the room, her voice an equally tense whisper.  
  
“The words on the board, I can’t see them. There’s some sort of haze around them.”  
  
“Like a magic haze?”  
  
“I don’t know, Mal.”  
  
They may have been whispering at the back of the room, but it wasn’t like they weren’t being kept an eye on.  
  
“Something you’d like to share with the class?” their teacher all but barked.  
  
“Something  _you’d_  like to share with the class?” Mal came back, quick as a whip. “Evie can’t see the board.”  
  
The teacher dismissed his attention from her.  
  
“Well, where are your glasses?” he asked Evie.  
  
“…My what?”  
  
“Her what?” Mal repeated.  
  
Teach clearly wasn’t thrilled to stop his lecturing to write Evie a pass to the nurse’s office, and even less than thrilled that Mal strong-armed her way into going along with her. But something akin to relief passed over his face when the girls took their things and walked out of the room, and as the door was closing behind them they heard his dull, droning voice picking up right where he’d left off.  
  
Dragon Hall didn’t have a nurse, all they had was Dr. Facilier and a half-empty bottle of aspirin. But when Mal thought “school nurse”, the last thing she pictured was someone like the tall mountain of a man lumbering before them in the nurse’s office, talking too too fast and telling the girls to call him “Sweet”. Mal barely even got the chance to finish explaining about why they came before Sweet had Evie around the shoulders and moved her in front of a chart on the wall.  
  
Mal had never seen anything so stupid, and she knew Gaston’s son. She didn’t understand how Evie reading aloud the letters on a chart was going to solve anything. Well, maybe she was speaking a counterspell, breaking whatever magic was over her. If messing with Evie was some preppy’s idea of VK hazing, Mal and her fists had a couple of words ready for them.  
  
As it were, Evie could read the giant “E” at the top (quite fitting) but little else. Sweet tapped a finger to his chin, very professional-like.  
  
“Everything else blurry?” he asked.  
  
“Well yeah, but it’s always been like that,” Evie answered.  
  
“Mhm, mhm, just as I thought. Astigmatism.”  
  
“Gesundheit,” Mal muttered.  
  
Sweet found that funny, laughing a bellowing laugh and clapping a huge hand to Mal’s back that staggered her where she stood.  
  
“It means you can’t see. Well, not perfectly, at least,” he told both of them. “An eye is supposed to be perfectly round, bends the light the right way. And Evie, yours don’t. The shape of your eyes isn’t perfect, and therefore; astigmatism.”  
  
Pale was never the appropriate word to describe Evie, but how it seemed fairly appropriate now.  
  
“…What do you mean ‘not perfect’?” she questioned, that concept standing out more to her than anything else did.  
  
“Means everything’s blurry. Words especially,” from out of nowhere he whipped out a much smaller copy of the chart on the wall, holding it up in front of Evie’s face. “Blurry?”  
  
“…Yes, a little,” Evie quietly said, looking quickly away from the chart like she couldn’t stand the sight of it.  
  
“So how do you fix it?” Mal demanded, barreling in between Evie and the chart.  
  
“Glasses, contacts. Surgery in extreme cases, but let’s not call this extreme.”  
  
“Surgery??” Evie gasped.  
  
Reaching out for Mal’s hand was not a common occurrence in Evie’s life, and allowing her hand to be held was not an occurrence in Mal’s life at all, but something in her made an exception this time.  
  
“Look, just because we’re villain kids doesn’t mean you can barge right in and—”  
  
Sweet interrupted Mal by whirling Evie into a chair and in turn whirling some mask-like machine in front of her face, something that reminded Mal too much of a spider for comfort. Sweet had her look at the chart on the far wall again, hands moving just as fast as he tended to talk.  
  
“Better?”  
  
“N—”  
  
“How about now?”  
  
“Not exactly…”  
  
“And now?”  
  
Back and forth he and Evie went, Mal just as lost as could be, until finally she looked to the chart and found Evie reading a good portion of the lines aloud. What happened next was really a lot of Sweet torpedoing around the room until he scribbled something on a pad of paper and excused himself for a minute, leaving Mal and Evie alone in the nurse’s office.  
  
“Evie,  _everything_  is blurry to you? What the heck? Why are you waiting until just now to say something?”   
  
Evie looked terribly small, drawn in on herself as she sat in that chair.  
  
“That’s just how I’ve always seen things, I didn’t think anything of it. At Dragon Hall I sat right at the front of all my classes, and sure, nothing was ever _totally_ crystal clear even up that close, but I thought that was normal. I didn’t realize anything was wrong…Mal, what’s wrong with me?”  
  
Evie looked up at her, eyes desperate for an answer.  
  
“You heard the doc. Astigmatism,” Mal shrugged, a bit callously.  
  
“But why?? Mal, I can’t see! And what if it just gets worse and worse? Or what if it’s a sign of something else going wrong and I lose my sight??”  
  
“This is a land with magic, I’m sure Fairy Godmother can just bibbidi-bobbidi-boo your sight back.”  
  
Mal thought the blasé attitude was helping until she saw the tears clouding Evie’s eyes. And the fear trembling on her lower lip.  
  
“Evie…”  
  
Mal hadn’t spoken that name so softly in the entire time she’d known that girl.  
  
“…E, you’ll be fine,” she insisted, a hand on Evie’s shoulder.  
  
Evie didn’t believe her. She had just gotten to Auradon, _just_ learned what a clear sky looked like. Or how flowers swayed in a breeze, or how the moon hung among the stars at night—a hazy and indistinct glowing orb, now that Evie was thinking about it, but still, it was more beautiful than anything she’d failed to see in The Isle’s sky. She couldn’t lose all of that now, she just couldn’t.  
  
“Hey, you heard Sweet. Glasses, contacts, it’s an easy fix,” Mal didn’t even know her voice could be so gentle.  
  
“He said surgery, too,” Evie pointed out, vision blurring with tears rather than imperfect eyesight.  
  
“In extreme cases. Which this isn’t.”  
  
“And what if it becomes extreme? Mal, I told you, what if it only gets worse??”  
  
“Then you and I will face it together the exact same way we’re facing it now. I think you’re going to be okay, I really do. But even if you aren’t, I’m still here with you. And I happen to have a spellbook filled with who-knows-what kind of magic, so, you know, there’s that. A little anti-blindness spell is a walk in the park for Maleficent’s daughter.”  
  
Evie giggled through her tears. Mal was relieved to hear it.  
  
“Look, Sweet isn’t worried, so I’m not either. And neither should you be,” Mal brushed away some blue that had fallen into Evie’s face.  
  
“…But what about wearing glasses?” Evie shyly said. Her mother’s shadow and her mother’s vanity still shrouded her even in Auradon.  
  
“Want to know a secret?”  
  
“What secret?”  
  
“Promise not to tell?”  
  
“Mal,” Evie laughed again.  
  
“Do you know what you’d look like with glasses?”  
  
Evie wasn’t quite sure she wanted to know the answer.  
  
“…What?” she softly prodded.  
  
Mal just grinned.  
  
“The fairest of them all.”  
  
Evie’s cheeks turned pink, a truly fair sight.  
  
“Tell you what, E. When you get your glasses, or your contacts, or whatever it is you’ll get, the first thing we’ll do? We’ll go on a walk. We’ll follow the road away from the school and we’ll find one of those Auradon forests you’ve read about in your books, the ones with the rustling leaves and the colorful flowers, and the butterflies flitting around everywhere? You and I will just look. You’ll see everything exactly how it is for the first time in your life, every single color and detail, every single blade of grass or vein in a leaf.”  
  
“And then at night, you and I can go outside and look at the stars? And the moon?” Evie asked excitedly, spirits brightening. “Mal, what’s the moon like when it’s not all fuzzy?”  
  
“…A lot like your smile.”  
  
A smile touched again by blushing cheeks.  
  
“…You promise we’ll see the world together?” Evie lifted her pinky, a seal stronger than any curse of an evil fairy, or contract of a sea witch.  
  
And Mal wrapped her pinky around Evie’s, a silent sign that her words couldn’t be any truer.  
  
“I promise.”


End file.
